There is a concept in psychoanalytic theory known as the enigmatic signifier: communication that is unmistakably meaningful yet resistant to interpretation.

The classic examples come from early childhood. Infants absorb tones, gestures, affective cues, invitations, and prohibitions—all charged with meaning, none of it fully understandable. As psychiatrist Ladson Hinton summarizes:

“Jean Laplanche has created an extensive metapsychology describing this situation, emphasizing the original helplessness of an infant who is bathed in enigmatic messages from its very beginnings. These messages from the adult other are often sexualized, and are partly or largely unconscious to the sender. Laplanche calls this situation ‘primal seduction’. The immature human cannot fully metabolize such adult messages, and through ‘primal repression’ they remain as the unconscious core of subjectivity. They disrupt psychological life, conveying a sense of signifying something to the subject. What they signify is an enigma, like finding a hieroglyph in the desert. The story of relationships and culture is the story of our repeated attempts to translate them, to respond to them.”

Much of what drives us is meaningful to us without being known by us.

This runs counter to the Romantic image of the self as a wellspring of native desire seeking expression. A Modernist account instead suggests that desire is cultivated by the forms we encounter. As Michael Levenson writes in Modernism, “Art, or the will to art, precedes desire.” I.e., we do not want to make TikToks until TikToks exist and we are exposed to them. We do not know what we want until a form gives it shape.

Nietzsche opens On the Genealogy of Morals [1] with a similar intuition. We are strangers to ourselves, oriented not by self-knowledge but by what we habitually serve. Attention goes somewhere first; meaning accrues later, incompletely, and never quite settles.

The enigmatic signifier in art

Some artworks do not merely engage our desire for symbolic fulfillment—they thwart it, and operate enigmatically by design.

Einstein on the Beach, the 1976 collaboration between Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, is a canonical example. The opera is composed almost entirely of signifiers that feel coherent and consequential without resolving into narrative. Language, movement, repetition, and image all generate significance without telling us what that significance is for.

“Will it get some wind for the sailboat
And it could get for it is
It could get the railroad for these workers
And it could be where it is
It could Franky, it could be Franky
It could be very fresh and clean
It could be a balloon
All these are the days my friends
And these are the days my friends”
– Einstein on the Beach, opening scene

To experience Einstein on the Beach is not to solve a puzzle. It’s to remain inside an ongoing act of meaning-making without resolution. The work doesn’t reward interpretation so much as attention. Its architecture is its meaning.

For this reason, people describe the opera as hypnotic, irritating, revelatory, unbearable—sometimes all at once. It doesn’t guide you toward closure. It asks you to stay present to significance without explanation.

The irreducibility of Einstein on the Beach makes the work cognitively instructive, not just aesthetically powerful. It trains a particular capacity: staying engaged with systems that are clearly consequential but not immediately legible.

Levenson again: “Art, we might say, is instead a social practice of culture… What sustains the social practice of art is miscellaneous and inconclusive talk.”

Meaning isn’t extracted and resolved. It’s circulated, inhabited, continuously reworked. Art does not resolve meaning; it teaches us how to live inside it.

The enigmatic signifier at work

Organizations, like families or nations, have their own aesthetic architectures. They crackle with unstated meaning. They are, in a real sense, strangers to themselves.

In organizational life, many behaviors are meaningful without being consciously available to the people enacting them. What looks like a “personality quirk” or “leadership style” or “growth area” can also be understood as a repeated attempt to enact and resolve a personal enigma—a charge of energy and tension that can’t be named directly.

Across a culture, these individual patterns form a lattice: an invisible architecture that is nevertheless essential—intrinsic to human cognition. It is generative, creative, and always oriented toward some form of release. These patterns cannot be fully translated into explicit explanations without losing what makes them operative. To demand immediate legibility is often to flatten the very dynamics that allow a system to move. 

Living—and working—inside this zone of meaning-making [2] is more fertile than playing the superficial game, whatever that game happens to be. It expands the available energy and allows for deeper and more original insight.

Participation over decoding

A central insight of cybernetics is this: we don’t understand complex systems by standing outside them and decoding their meaning. We understand them—partially and provisionally—by participating in them, disturbing them, and being disturbed in return.

What the concept of the enigmatic signifier ultimately points to is not a new form of mastery, but a different relationship to systems altogether. Self-actualization is less about achievement than about colluding with one’s own enigma, and from there discovering where energy pools, learning how it moves.

This orientation involves grief and humility, because the interpretation of the human condition offered here is partly tragic. But it also opens the door to deeper connection and creativity. Our lives are works of art, and artworks are living, shared practices.

As the world gets faster, more conflicted, more saturated with tools promising instant clarity—this capacity becomes more precious. The capacity to honor what makes human cognition irreducible and different from AI. To stay with what can’t be resolved.

All these are the days, my friends. And these are the days.

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RIP to Ladson Hinton and Robert Wilson, both of whom passed away in 2025.

[1] Nietzsche’s beautiful expression of this is worth reading in full: 

We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves: this has its own good reason. We have never searched for ourselves—how should it then come to pass, that we should ever find ourselves? Rightly has it been said: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Our treasure is there, where stand the hives of our knowledge. It is to those hives that we are always striving; as born creatures of flight, and as the honey-gatherers of the spirit, we care really in our hearts only for one thing—to bring something “home to the hive!”

As far as the rest of life with its so-called “experiences” is concerned, which of us has even sufficient serious interest? or sufficient time? In our dealings with such points of life, we are, I fear, never properly to the point; to be precise, our heart is not there, and certainly not our ear. Rather like one who, delighting in a divine distraction, or sunken in the seas of his own soul, in whose ear the clock has just thundered with all its force its twelve strokes of noon, suddenly wakes up, and asks himself, “What has in point of fact just struck?” so do we at times rub afterwards, as it were, our puzzled ears, and ask in complete astonishment and complete embarrassment, “Through what have we in point of fact just lived?” further, “Who are we in point of fact?” and count, after they have struck, as I have explained, all the twelve throbbing beats of the clock of our experience, of our life, of our being—ah!—and count wrong in the endeavour. Of necessity we remain strangers to ourselves, we understand ourselves not, in ourselves we are bound to be mistaken, for of us holds good to all eternity the motto, “Each one is the farthest away from himself”—as far as ourselves are concerned we are not “knowers.”

[2] The image of the undercommons from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney offers a resonant parallel: a shared field of fugitive meaning-making that resists capture while remaining profoundly generative.